Recently we held a "Hackathon" – an internal codefest where we asked our programmers to come up with cool features that weren’t already on the roadmap. For 48 hours, fueled by boxes of pizza and creative thought, they worked long into the night, and developed a number of products and features.

One of the first Hackathon projects we’re releasing is the Open Virtual Phone Bank.

You may remember that back in November, NGP VAN announced its acquisition of NationalField. Our startup launched out of the 2008 Obama campaign and the product provides online organizing networks and powerful data dashboards to campaigns and organizations fighting for change. Around the time it became official, we hinted at several exciting changes to come. Since then, our team has been heads down, churning through hundreds of thousands of lines of code in preparation for a major update.

A few years ago a new email anti-spam fighting authentication tool DMARC was created. The system creates a pretty restricted way of authenticating email, the short of which says email from a domain is only legit if it comes certain ways. It’s a great way to prevent spoofing, but if implemented needlessly (it’s not recommended for everyone) it can easily break things.

Today, we’re proud to announce the release of a powerful new feature called VAN Relay - a feature that seamlessly enhances your member data and activist data with voter file information. Think of VAN Relay as a clearinghouse that scans the entire platform for better data enhancement.